Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.”

— George Orwell

302. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

— George Orwell

303. “The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

— George Orwell

304. “Who cares?′ she said impatiently, ’it’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”

— George Orwell

305. “The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.”

— George Orwell

306. “Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.”

— George Orwell

307. “The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.”

— George Orwell

308. “And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.”

— George Orwell

309. “The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.”

— George Orwell

310. “The end was contained in the beginning.”

— George Orwell

311. “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.”

— George Orwell

312. “Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.”

— George Orwell

313. “The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.”

— George Orwell

314. “Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.”

— George Orwell

315. “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.”

— George Orwell

316. “We may be together for another six months – a year – there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?”

— George Orwell

317. “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”

— George Orwell

318. “The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.”

— George Orwell

319. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”

— George Orwell

320. “All art is propaganda.”

— George Orwell

321. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

— George Orwell

322. “The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

— George Orwell

323. “It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

— George Orwell

324. “The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.”

— George Orwell

325. “Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.”

— George Orwell

326. “Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.”

— George Orwell

327. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

— George Orwell

328. “Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.”

— George Orwell

329. “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

330. “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

— George Orwell

331. “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

332. “The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.”

— George Orwell

333. “The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”

— George Orwell

334. “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

— George Orwell

335. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”

— George Orwell

336. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

— George Orwell

337. “The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.”

— George Orwell

338. “Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

— George Orwell

339. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

— George Orwell

340. “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell

341. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

— George Orwell

342. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”

— George Orwell

343. “Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men.”

— George Orwell

344. “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.”

— George Orwell

345. “You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see.”

— George Orwell

346. “A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor – it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.”

— George Orwell

347. “And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered.”

— George Orwell

348. “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

— George Orwell

349. “Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.”

— George Orwell

350. “Writing a novel is agony.”

— George Orwell